Wednesday 22 October 2003 03.57 EDT
First published on Wednesday 22 October 2003 03.57 EDT

Local elections tend to take the temperature of public opinion, or apathy, in most European capitals. In Albania, still recovering from half a century of communist isolation, they are, above all, a hurdle on the road to becoming a "normal", democratic country.

Watched closely by numerous international organisations, Albania cleared that hurdle on October 12, voting peacefully and struggling only with problems such as overflowing ballot boxes, chaotic voter registration and sporadic electricity supplies in many of its mountain towns.

Both sides are claiming victory while results are still to be confirmed, but the election itself is almost more significant than the results. If the peaceful vote was a mini-triumph for normality, the mayor of Tirana, 38-year-old Edi Rama, is the outstanding "normal" candidate.

Rama, a former sculptor, basketball player and culture minister, claims to have won a landslide 58% victory in the capital, where almost a third of Albania's 3.1 million inhabitants live.

But while results have yet to be confirmed, the mayor is already recognised as the winner. He is seen as the man who has done the most to cheer Albania up in the past few years, despite the fact that it remains Europe's poorest country.

Since he first became mayor, in October 2000, Rama, has knocked down hundreds of illegal and dilapidated buildings that made Tirana look more like a building site than a capital city. In their place he has created parks and green spaces.

The human-sized potholes that make Tirana's pavements a permanent hazard are being gradually plugged and the streets are no longer strewn with rubbish.

An army of painters has splashed bright colours over once drab concrete housing blocks built during Albania's communist years. Even the prime minister woke up one pre-election morning to find his block, in the centre of town, had undergone the rainbow treatment.

Stylish young Albanians now sip coffee in numerous shiny cafes that have mushroomed in the leafiest streets of downtown Tirana.

Rama - noted for his wacky taste in shirts and for surrounding himself with good-looking suit-wearing female municipal staff - describes himself as "a pop star among mayors and a mayor among pop stars".

He led this October's election campaign with a rap song called "Tirona", the slang name for the capital city, recorded together with one of Albania's leading hip-hop bands, West Side Family.

"This is the city where mosques and churches are built side by side / This is the place where the snobs with Rolex watches go to the gypsy market / This is the place of disillusions where dreams become reality / Here is where you meet a mayor shouting down a megaphone / Where anything can happen / Where not just the women but also the facades of buildings can wear makeup."

Around 80% of Albanians approve of the facelift Rama has given their capital city, according to polls. But the provocative mayor - whose father was one of Albania's leading sculptors, producing statues of the communist dictator Enver Hoxha - has not escaped criticism.

He is charged with paying too much attention to cosmetic changes in a country where the vast majority still do not have drinking water, effective sewage systems or regular electricity supplies.

Some joke they are in the hands of a megalomaniac mayor, who may soon change the city's name to Ti-Rama.

In the 1990s, when he returned from his post-communist retreat in France, Rama survived a reported assassination attempt after openly criticising the then president, Sali Berisha.

He argues now that cheering Albania up is the key to its social, economic and political renaissance and to changing the country's international image as the "land of prostitutes and illegal immigrants".